what's good : a little Austin
stop here for some marvelous poetry, art, and food
In poetry: I don’t know how I stumbled onto this poem a few years ago but I love how it has stuck with me - for its nontraditional structure, an anecdote in paragraphs instead of fragmented stanzas, and for its powerful brevity in the language + imagery. Every time I read it I ‘see’ a photograph that in reality I’ve never put my eyes on, and I feel the universal paradox of knowing but not really knowing a parent. I think it would make a compelling exercise in writing - find a photo and try to tell its story both literally & metaphorically, see what comes into focus.
Punctum / Metaphor by Carolina Ebeid Love remains a kind of present tense. This is how we describe the scenes in photographs—as though the actions in them were still happening. My father is throwing a rock in this picture. My father keeps lions in his chest & they rip apart a gazelle in this picture. A man throwing a rock; the image holds an old grammar. This rock has yet to leave the hand, to measure the horizontal span from A to B. Nor has it completed the vertical distance from first line to last line, riding a tangle of syntax. The photograph captures a skirmish in the West Bank town of Nablus; the man hurling the rock is my father insofar as Juliet is the sun.
In art: When I travel, I try not to plan every moment to empty absurdity but also I need to have a plan (#Virgo) so before I go anywhere, I collect places in a Map Guide on my phone. I add friends’ recommendations and also search the Internet [thanks, Atlas Obscura!] for unique restaurants, historical sites, off-the-beaten-path attractions, local shops. I usually put in museums also though consider that I might not have the time to properly invest during a short trip, which can be a bittersweet experience - but last week in Austin I got lucky. I had a few hours to spend wandering so I narrowed my stops from Lamar east on 6th Street as far as I could walk in the 90+ degree heat with 40% humidity without collapsing. I started at West Chelsea Contemporary gallery, admittedly because it was next to the Treaty Oak but also because when I looked at their website, they were featuring a street art exhibit. I was thrilled + enthralled, ultimately spending two hours there and not [just] because of the air conditioning; everything was marvelous - I ended up buying an exquisite print of Alicia Keys by Swoon that I stowed & guarded in the overhead compartment on our flight home with the wide-eyed delirium of Gollum.
What I want to share today though is a piece that was displayed at WCC but I wasn’t allowed to photograph: a triptych version of Banksy’s wistfully lovely Love is in the Air (Flower Thrower).
I had the good luck of finding a Banksy in the wild [of Paris] - Man with Dog - when our family was vacationing there shortly after the artist painted it. I appreciate how his work seems simple in its execution yet the lines are startlingly precise and the details reveal layers; we the viewers are left to sift through them, feel a flurry of feelings, and figure out what to do with what we know better now.
Part of what I think makes this version of Flower Thrower especially poignant is how dividing the image into three parts makes that man three potential people on that street - someone offering a gift; a possible militant or thief; someone giving directions or a helping hand. Banksy has deliberately broken his original picture into different distinct points (puncta) so we are forced to look at and determine the significance of each piece.
Believe it or not, I didn’t originally consider how Carolina Ebeid’s poem relates pretty much exactly to this Banksy work but here we are. Wow, Universe.
In food: One of the many places I had on my Austin Map Guide was kalimotxo (say “cali-mocho”), a place I added for its cool name [that I have to look at in writing for a few silent seconds every time I try to pronounce it], plus the idea of “Basque-inflected” Spanish tapas, and also because it was [ahem] only* a 20-minute walk from our hotel.
If you find yourself in Austin and are an adventurous eater, this is a place to go. They also have tasty cocktails and a kindly smart & attentive waitstaff PLUS an ongoing recording of Greek myths playing in the bathroom; if it weren’t a single stall I would have been in there for the rest of the evening listening.
*Another travel detail about me is my underestimating or ignoring of distances, particularly when trying to get places in extreme weather. When we arrived at kalimotxo last Friday evening, after having walked many many sweaty blocks before the Texas sunset, I think I did a bad job of not barking NO at the lovely hostess who asked if we wanted to sit outside.
Oh my gosh, that Bansky. <3